What's new in the Well-Architected Framework

This document lists significant changes to the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework.

August 7, 2025

• AI and ML perspective: Reliability : Major update to expand the reliability recommendations in the AI and ML perspective.

July 28, 2025

• Added the Financial services industry (FSI) perspective . These documents describe principles and recommendations that are specific to FSI, aligned to each pillar of the Architecture Framework.

May 28, 2025

• AI and ML perspective: Cost optimization : Major update to expand the cost optimization recommendations in the AI and ML perspective.

April 28, 2025

• AI and ML perspective: Operational excellence : Major update to expand the operational excellence recommendations in the AI and ML perspective.

February 5, 2025

• Security, privacy, and compliance pillar : Major update to align the recommendations with core principles of security, privacy, and compliance.

December 30, 2024

• Reliability pillar : Major update to align the recommendations with core principles of reliability.

December 6, 2024

• Performance optimization pillar : Major update to align the recommendations with core principles of performance optimization.

October 31, 2024

• Operational excellence pillar : Major update to align the recommendations with core principles of operational excellence.

October 11, 2024

• Added the AI and ML perspective . These documents describe principles and recommendations that are specific to AI and ML, aligned to each pillar of the Architecture Framework.

September 25, 2024

• Cost optimization pillar : Major update to align the recommendations with core principles of cost optimization.

August 27, 2024

• The System Design category of the Architecture Framework has been removed. The guidance in this category is available in other Google Cloud documentation.

June 4, 2024

• Cost optimization category:
  • Added information about monitoring the cost of Dataflow resources.
  • Add recommendations for optimizing cost by using the at-least-once streaming mode and the dynamic thread scaling feature.

May 31, 2024

• Cost optimization category:
  • Added information about the FinOps hub .

May 30, 2024

• System design category:
  • Added a new design principle, Design for change .

May 23, 2024

• Cost optimization category:
  • Added guidance in Optimize cost: Compute, containers, and serverless about reducing cost by suspending idle Compute Engine VMs .

May 16, 2024

• System design category:
  • Added information about the Batch service in Choose and manage compute .

May 9, 2024

• Cost optimization category:
  • Updated guidance about Dataflow Shuffle in Optimize cost: Databases and smart analytics .

April 22, 2024

• Cost optimization category:
  • Added a recommendation about considering storage cost when configuring the log-retention period in Optimize cost: Cloud operations .

March 29, 2024

• Reliability category:
  • Reorganized the guidance related to SLOs and SLIs to improve usability and alignment with SRE guidance.

January 4, 2024

• Performance optimization category:
  • Updated the guidance for Network Service Tiers .

November 28, 2023

• Reliability category:
  • Reorganized the content to improve readability and consistency:
  • Define SLOs : Moved "Terminology" section to new page: Terminology
  • Adopt SLOs : Moved "SLOs and Alerts" section to new page: SLOs and Alerts

November 9, 2023

• System design category:
  • Added guidance to help cloud architects to choose deployment archetypes for workloads in Google Cloud.